I think that there will continue to be consolidation in the EDA industry. At each process node, fewer and fewer designs ship in high enough volume to recover the enormous investment in bringing them to market, which is a bad trend for EDA. Several companies in the ecosystem will go public if the market conditions remain favorable: eSilicon, Tensilica, Atrenta. Although, as with Apache, they may get acquired at the last minute (at high valuations). Mentor may get acquired, or sell off some business lines.

Paul McLellan
Blogger, semiwiki.com
www.semiwiki.com